Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you – you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNFor us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
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Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
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If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
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When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
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Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.
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I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.
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Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word ‘modernity’ if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
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A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
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The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.
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The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
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Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
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Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.
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Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
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A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
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The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
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It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
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Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
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The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
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Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
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Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
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In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
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The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
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It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions – especially selfish ones.
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Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
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